HII [HII] recently launched its new Odyssey suite of autonomy solutions that it says can be put on any ground, air, surface sea, or undersea vehicle to be made into a robotic system.
The company, rebranded from its former name of Huntington Ingalls Industries, said the Odyssey suite includes multi-vehicle collaborative autonomy, autonomous health monitoring, sensor fusion and perception. HII announced the release of the suite on April 4, at the start of the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space expo.
“The same base software can be integrated on unmanned systems across domains, including Unmanned Surface Vehicles [USV], Unmanned Underwater Vehicles [UUV], Unmanned Ground Vehicles, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles[UAV],” Duane Fotheringham, president of the Unmanned Systems business group at HII’s mission technologies division, said in a statement.
Fotheringham added that this technology “enables collaboration and advances mission operations, while providing joint situational awareness. We’ve taken the best capabilities from our field-proven autonomous solutions and can integrate them on any manned or unmanned platform, to increase autonomy and enhance distributed operations.”
HII said Odyssey is currently integrated on naval prototypes under development and thus far has been fielded on 23 vessel types for more than 6,000 hours.
The company said the software suite combines autonomy features from its Remus UUV product line as well as multi-vehicle cross-domain capabilities. The Odyssey suite includes scalable autonomy ranging from manpower reduction and remote control to fully autonomous capability.
According to a product brochure, Odyssey features a “plug-and-play design” aimed at easily integrating customer or third-party sensors, payloads, algorithms and interfaces.
HII said the software is aligned with industry open architecture standards to include the Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture (UMAA), Robot Operating System (ROS) and Data Distribution Service (DDS).
The company noted it unveiled Odyssey after successfully rapidly integrating and demonstrating HII’s suite of solutions with third-party autonomy products on an HII USV platform. This was meant to demonstrate the system’s “open architecture and flexibility.”
The unveiling by HII is part of the company’s effort to shift it from being just a shipbuilder to a more broad defense technology company.
This comes after HII acquired Hydroid, a firm focused on UUVs in 2020 (Defense Daily, Feb. 4, 2020), and last year bought Alion Science and Technology to further position it for the Navy’s future focus on unmanned and networked naval warfare.